Re: [RFC PATCH] Re: Empty directories...

From: Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>
Date: Jul 23, 2007, 22:05 UTC
Message-ID: <87hcnun5dc.fsf@hades.wkstn.nix>
In-Reply-To: <87lkd6n62i.fsf@hades.wkstn.nix>

On 23 Jul 2007, nix@esperi.org.uk outgrape:

> (I'd recommend storing the names of user/group file owners as well as
> the uids, so you can --- given suitable permissions --- chown to the
> right username in preference to uid if that user exists at checkout
> time.)

Suddenly this gets more complex. git-merge-file(1) has to understand the contents of this file, so as not to consider merges conflicting unless two files actually have different permissions (i.e. doing a line by line diff, and combining the two such that at most one file with a given name exists in the result), and so as not to consider lines with differing ownerships conflicting unless we're running under a uid in which we can change ownerships at all. (I'd like to track ownership but it's looking like a bit of a nest of snakes.)

And the problem is that while git has a lot of strategies for merging *trees*, its file merge system is totally unpluggable: it just falls back to xdiff's merging system. I guess I'll have to add that feature :)

(How does this cope with binary files, I wonder? I seem to recall something about that flying past back before the volume of the git list overwhelmed me...)